Fly with Birds
— Tom Scott on a French man who flies a microlight aircraft with flocks of birds, sometimes to help protected species to migrate #
Different Strokes
— a collaborative art gallery where visitors are encouraged to improve the art, try the Hall of Fame and "See Original" on any painting (via) #
Molly White on creating digital scarcity for artists without a blockchain
— NFTs without cryptocurrency are possible, but can a platform exist without speculative investors propping it up (via) #
Music from Nancy
— experimental performance piece from 1979 based on Nancy comics, with an illustrated score (via) #
Google shows prototype AR glasses with real-time language translation
— massive potential, but the privacy implications are profound #
Today In Tabs on TerraUSD’s unstable stablecoin
— this was entertaining to watch yesterday until I saw a suicide hotline topping their subreddit #
NYT analyzes Tucker Carlson’s conspiratorial and insular language over time
— using transcripts from all 1,150 episodes, spreading paranoid conspiracies of white replacement and victimhood #
Aaron A. Reed on business management games from the 1950s
— early computerized text games for executives #
Wordle! pivots to Wordle clone after sale to mobile publisher
— a disappointing end to the totally different iOS game with a coincidentally-same name #
Visualizing one million U.S. covid-19 deaths
— a grim milestone, undercounting the actual death toll (via) #
Dracula Daily takes over Tumblr
— the serialized Dracula is sent as a real-time newsletter based on the dates in the 1897 novel, spawning a new fandom #
Mother Jones feature on the destructive force of private equity on American businesses
— this is the same strategy Elon Musk is using to saddle Twitter with billions in new debt #
Em Lazer-Walker on running virtual events
— interesting thoughts informed by her experience building Roguelike Celebration's brilliant MUD-like social space #
Ironic Sans makes the case for adding “keming” to the dictionary
— he coined the term in 2008 and has tracked its adoption ever since #
The YouTubers are not okay
— Daniel Howell's feature-length video on why he quit YouTube is very good #
How one Uyghur woman escaped a Chinese internment camp
— this harrowing story just won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting #
Max Read on “the Current Thing” meme
— from "normie" to "NPC" to the world's richest men finding new ways to say the things you care about are basic #
Peeled Maps
— community-contributed images of tattoos stitched into surreal explorable landscapes (via) #
Wired feature on Shein’s sudden rise
— great reporting on the viral Chinese fast-fashion behemoth, with surprising access to the company (via) #
Noto Emoji
— Jennifer Daniel and her team at Google turned 3,663 emoji into an open monochrome typeface with multiple weights #
Empire Strikes Back remade for the C64
— astounding fan recreation of the Atari 2600 game, tried this today on my C64 and it's amazing #
Adam Neely on the financial risk of touring as an indie band in 2022
— with a discussion of the widespread belief that musicians should be miserable on tour #
The Real Fight for Abortion Rights Is Not in the Courts or Congress
— "This abandonment by lawmakers is why so many of the most effective solutions we have right now are being developed far outside the realm of electoral politics." #
Motherboard reveals SafeGraph is selling location data of people visiting abortion clinics
— same founder/CEO as Rapleaf (aka LiveRamp), the creepy company that got in trouble for selling private user info that it mined across the web #
Alito’s Plan to Repeal the 20th Century
— the draft opinion opens the door to a rollback of federally-assured civil rights #
Travel distance for people seeking abortions if Roe v Wade falls
— interactive map showing the impact in states ready to ban abortion, along with source data #
The Supreme Court Leaks All the Time
— the original Roe v Wade ruling was leaked too, published in Time hours before it was announced #
God Damn America
— "a brief and incomplete list of the people and institutions that can go fuck themselves this morning" (via) #
My Heart Will Go On (but it’s Smash Mouth’s “All Star”)
— "One of the most cursed things I've ever made. I'm so sorry." #
Angelheaded Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection
— Emily Gorcenski's "requiem for the Twitter that could have been" #
The Pudding needs help debunking a flawed study on age and randomness
— peer-reviewed does not mean reproducible #
the html review
— "an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web" with contributions from Everest Pipkin, Nick Montfort, May-Li Khoe, and more #
The Qubit Game
— Google teamed up with the designer of A Dark Room and Gridland to make a quantum computing-themed clicker game (via) #
Are You The Asshole?
— pose scenarios to three AI models trained exclusively on YTA, NTA, and hybrid answers from Reddit #
Underunderstood tries to find the MTV dial position sticker
— amazing deep-dive into the history of FM radio delivered over cable TV lines in the '80s for early stereo audio #